Unofficial news and tips about Google

May 17, 2007

No JavaScript, No Google Navigation

If you disable JavaScript in your browser, you'll notice that the recently updated Google.com doesn't have too many navigational links anymore. That's because the menu from the top left corner is written entirely in JavaScript.

Google, that usually writes pages with graceful degradation in mind and builds custom interfaces that don't require JavaScript (Google Maps, Gmail), forgot about the browsers that don't support JavaScript (text browsers, some mobile browsers) and the users that have JavaScript turned off for its biggest assets: the homepage and the search results pages.

Here's a quote from Google's guidelines for webmasters: "Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site." That means there's another problem: Google.com will be more difficult to crawl.

19 comments:

I do not pine for the Google of old. Rather, I wait patiently for its replacement. By demonstrating to so many, how easily an important web service can be disabled, Google only hastens its own demise. Maybe I will short some Googily stock.

Degrading gracefully is the sign of a thoughtful designer who wants toreach the largest possible audience and cares about the users. Especially if he designs one of the most popular sites in the world.

Another annoyance is that you can't middle or right click the links in the 'More' drop down menu to open them in a new tab. I find it very surprising that Google didn't take non-javascript browsers into account...

I agree that designers should take all users into consideration and construct designs that degrade gracefully. Google However is in the position to ignore the rules we have to adhere too.

I am sure that this same discussion was held @ Google, This is their homepage and I'm sure they made this decision consciously.

I can understand, and I might add slightly impressed, that Google would launch this. Perhaps Google is forcing, gently I might add, its users to upgrade and progress forward so that they can continue to pursue the advanced technology that web 2.0 can offer...?

In over two years, no one here has realised that the reason those links are written in Javascript is because the things that they link to will not work without Javascript? The "degradation" is actually flawless.

But for the record, I hate Javascript and look forward to it going the same way as marquee tags, animated GIFs and Flash websites.